What are the results of the new agrarian policy? This question legitimately interests all workers. Government statistics are kept so poorly and so tendentiously that one cannot trust them. It is beyond doubt that the new land policy is a bourgeois policy, but it is managed entirely by Messrs. Purishkevich, Markov and Co., that is to say, reactionaries of the old type. From such "management" it is difficult to expect anything other than collapse.

Let us note the conclusions of Mr. V. Obolenskii in the latest issue of *Russkaya Mysl'* (1913, No. 2). This journal is Black Hundred-Cadet in character. The author of the article is also a counter-revolutionary—which means a witness biased rather in favor of the landowners. This author found in Samara Province a district (Novouzenskii) with "tremendous" successes of "land settlement": more than half the household heads have had their land allotted in one place.

And yet the conclusion to which the author was compelled to arrive is this:

"…As regards the immediate results of the new agrarian reform, it is difficult to recognize them as in any way gratifying… A considerable quantity of allotted lands has passed for a pittance from peasant semi-proletarians to well-to-do peasants and speculator-purchasers… Rental prices have risen… The difference in economic productivity between individual and communal-interspersed tenure is entirely negligible… The new law… has served to sharpen the contradictions between the conditions of economic life and its inner content… Perhaps peasant thought is now working more energetically than it worked during the very height of the past revolution."

As to where the working thought of the peasants is directed, there is no need to ask the liberal from *Russkaya Mysl'*. It is no wonder that he has entirely left in shadow the question of feudal economy on the landowners' lands.

But one must think carefully about the conclusions of the liberal landowner. All contradictions have been sharpened, exploitation has increased, rental prices have risen, the progress of the economy is entirely negligible. Not "perhaps," but certainly, peasant thought is working.

*Pravda* No. 45, February 23, 1913. Signed: V. I.

Printed from the text of the newspaper *Pravda*